So you want to make in infographic? 4 useful options

Tweet

We're putting together a guide to various infographic software for our students, so I've had cause to play around with a few. I find a lot of tools recomended on the web just don't quite work for educational stuff (or, indeed, library stuff); they're just too much style and not enough substance.

Also, all the articles about infographic tools are entitled things like '61 GREAT INFOGRAPHIC PACKAGES!' which always baffles me somewhat. Maybe it's the information professional in me, but I think if you're going to write something recommending a set of tools, you should at least narrow the number down to a recommended few...

So what are the most effective tools for creating meaningful infographics?

1) Great for stats and figures: Piktochart

I really like Piktochart. It's the tool we use most often at work. My colleagues have used the templates to create infographics, for example this one has been used to explain library processes to users in a way that is engaging and easy to understand:

An example of a Piktochart template

It's simple to take something like the template above and change the images (there's a huge built in library of icons, or you can use your own) and the colours etc to suit whatever you wish to express. Piktochart also has seperate templates for Reports, which are nice.

For me, though, the way it integrates very easily with your own data from Excel or Google Sheets, which you can import from a .CSV file, is the best thing about this tool. So it takes what you already have and makes it visually appealing, which helps prevent the all-style-no-substance issue that afflicts a lot of infographics.

You can import your own data

Although Piktochart does infographics, reports, and some really nice data visualisation with maps, I've mostly used it to create individual charts which I've then exported for use in other things, like Action Plan documents, or presentations. In the example below, all the graphs etc and visualisations are from Piktochart, and I'm by no means an expert user so this is just scratching the surface of what it can do.

Digital Scholarship at York from Ned Potter

Piktochart is free, but also has reasonably priced educational packages, one of which we have at York, that allow you a few more options and some more features. 

2) Good for flexibility: Canva

Canva does a lot more besides infographics. It's really good for creating images perfectly sized for social media, and they put genuinely useful tips on their design school blog.

At York we've used Canva for creating one page guides to things like Google Scholar, or JSTOR, in order to embed them in the VLE, blogs, etc. Canva is simple to use and there are a lot of nice built in fonts and images which can make otherwise not-overly-exciting subjects a bit more engaging for users.

You can use Canva for free, which is what we do. It tries to tempt you in with paid for images and templates, but you can also import your own images so there's no requirement to pay for theirs if you don't want to.

Here's the interface and an example of a free to use template you can build on:

The Canva interface

I'd recommend playing around with Canva if you've not used it, because it has so many potential applications. The trick, really, is being able to sort through the paid stuff to find the free stuff, and being able to sort through the superficial 'this is probably great if you're the web designer for an artisan baker in Portland' templates to find the 'I can actually see this working in my world' examples...

3) Good for interactivity: Infogram

Infogram is particularly good for creating graphics you want to embed online, because they can be responsive and interactive depending on what you do with them. It's basically about hovering over different bits of the graphics, but it does allow you to focus on certain parts of the data more easily than a static chart allows. See the example below:

Top 5 smartphone makers shipments
Create your own infographics

Other pluses with Infogram include its ability to import data from a really impressive variety of sources. Downsides include the free version being fairly stripped back of features, and even the cheaper paid for version being out of financial reach for most non-profits.

4) Good for surprising you with its potential for making infographics: PowerPoint!

The much maligned PowerPoint is actually a very good tool which is often deployed spectacularly badly by its users. It's more flexible people than people realise (especially the two most recent iterations, 2013 + 2016), and that makes it surprisingly good for infographics. The main reason it's good is because you can take something - a chart or graph from excel, words written in interesting fonts, icons, images - and put it on a slide, and it just stays where you put it. Then you can layer more and more stuff on, and easily move it around - unlike Word which is a nightmare for that sort of thing, and a bit like Photoshop, but without the need for a 2 year learning curve...

The keys to making an infographic are firstly to edit your slide to the right dimensions: go into the Design tab, choose Page setup and then choose, for example, A3, Portrait. Your single slide is your infographic. Secondly, use images from somewhere like freeimages.com, or icons from iconfinder.com, to make your content interesting (along side graphs and charts you can copy and paste in from Excel). Thirdly, use a non-standard font - download one from fontsquirrel.com - as typography makes a huge difference.

Bonus option: Visual.ly for Google Analytics Infographics

If you have a website which uses Google Analytics to track statistics, but don't want to be logging in to check your stats all the time, visual.ly provide a useful free service. You log in with your Google ID, give them your analytics code, and they send you a weekly infographic which tells you how you've done in all the key areas. When you have a good week it's a nice friendly blue, if you have a not-so-good week it's red for danger...

Sign up for yours at visual.ly, here. Everything else visual.ly does is a paid for service, but the Analytics infographics are free.

---

Do you have any recommendations I should add to this list? Leave me a comment below.

Upcoming presentation skills workshops and library marketing training

Just a quick post to say here's the current list of open workshops I'm doing this year - if you want to see if I'm doing something at your organisation specifically then the full listing is on the Upcoming Events page, but below are the non-in-house events currently in the diary. Hope to see you at one of them!

You can see a whole load of feedback from previous workshops via the Training page.

An Alternative to Seth Godin's 5 Rules to create amazing PowerPoint Presentations

Tweet

Seth Godin is a very influential man, and his views on PowerPoint carry a lot of weight. He wrote a famous post a while back (1.5k Facebook shares, a gazillion tweets about it etc) on creating amazing presentations - you can read it here. I agree with lots of it completely, but I'm not totally on board with the five rules at the end.

My take on Seth's rules

No more than six words on a slide. EVER. There is no presentation so complex that this rule needs to be broken. To me this seems too arbitrary. Fewer words is without doubt better than more words when it comes to slides - they're presentation tools not written documents. But six? As the maximum ever? Unless that's based on research that shows seven or more words reduces the effectiveness of your PowerPoint, why limit yourself in such an extreme way? I'd say one or two sentences to ensure brevity but allow yourself a little flexibility in conveying meaning and nuance.

No cheesy images. Use professional stock photo images. First of all there are plenty of cheesy professional stock photos! Authenticity is key. The trick is to find images which look like the camera has happened upon a real scene - lots of pro stock images show impossibly perfect people laughing flirtatiously over a blank iPad, I mean come on. I find Pixabay and Unsplash have enough for most presentations I make, plus someone introduced me to Pexels the other day which looks good, and they're all free - both of copyright and financial cost. The professional stock photo sites cost a fortune to use - why use them when so many great (legal) images can be found for free?

No dissolves, spins or other transitions. Yup. No argument here. If it's extraneous to your story, all you're doing is reducing the impact of your message.

Sound effects can be used a few times per presentation, but never use the sound effects that are built in to the program. Instead, rip sounds and music from CDs and leverage the Proustian effect this can have. If people start bouncing up and down to the Grateful Dead, you’ve kept them from falling asleep, and you’ve reminded them that this isn’t a typical meeting you’re running. I like the idea about using music etc but it really needs a certain type of high energy presentation performance to pull this off. It's not for everybody (I couldn't do it). It's hard to think of a rule around sound that is absolute; it all depends on your audience, and some of them way think the use of music is a little distracting, whatever your music taste... From what I understand about the Proustian effect it's a very personal thing; I'm not sure a presenter could expect to cause or induce it for a room full of people. 

Don’t hand out print-outs of your slides. They don’t work without you there. I agree with this. But I wouldn't put it in my top 5...

Header pic is a CC-BY image by Betsyweber - clcik to view original on Flickr.

My own top 5 rules for creating effective PowerPoint slides

So what would I put in my top 5 rules for creating amazing PowerPoint presentations? I can answer that question because the intro to my full-day Presentation Skills training is built around five golden rules, based on existing research into what makes for an effective presentations - and that's the aim here, to build something which works. 'Amazing' is no good on its own; you need people to remember your key messages, not just how great a presenter you were.

Here we go:

1. Keep it simple. Slides don't need to be flash - get rid of anything that doesn't tell your specific story, and leave behind something which supports and reinforces what you're saying out loud, and prompts you as to what to say next.
2. No more bullets. Bullet points ruin slides. They're fine for documents, but you're not making a document in PowerPoint. As well as being symptomatic of a general Death By PowerPoint malaise, they make people less likely to agree with, understand and remember your presentation. Oh and they like you less when you use them. That's enough of a reason to never use them, surely?
3. Make one point per slide. Make your point, allow your audience to digest it, then move on together in sync with them. Several points on a slide inevitably result in your audience moving at a different pace to you, because they can only listen and read for a few short seconds. Why be in conflict with your presentation materials when you don't have to? Give each key message room to breathe.
4. Big fresh fonts. Font size 24 is the absolute minimum you should ever use in slides. If you need more you're trying to fit too much on one slide. Either ditch some text or cascade it across two slides. Non-standard fonts (which is to say, fonts which don't appear in the Office Suite) can, if chosen carefully, increase the impact of your presentation. Typography is underrated.
5. More images, less text. Too much text stops slides working. Relevant images help people learn. Make the most of your opportunity with each new PowerPoint you make!

A decade in Libraries: it's more fragmented now, but that's okay

Tweet

10 years ago last month, I started my first job in the Information profession.

This is the New Horizons space probe, which launched in the same month as my own journey through librarianship (**HONKINGLY TRITE JOURNEY METAPHOR KLAXON**) trying to get to Pluto. It got there last year - my daughter was 2 that day and I deeply regretted not taking annual leave for her birthday. Other things that happened in my first month in this profession included Charlie Kennedy resigning from the Lib Dems and a whale swimming in the Thames. #AbsoluteScenes

It was a Customer Services role at the University of Leeds: back then I was fine with the term 'customer' in a library context, actively pleased about it in fact, and right away my Dad began the process of helping me understand how wrong I was... I had no intention to stay in library work - it was a temporary measure, and I wasn't even first choice for the job: I'd been interviewed months earlier and was first reserve for if anything came up! But it turned out to be about a million times more interesting than I expected, so I stuck around. (There's more on my library roots here. Remember the Library Routes Project? That was great. The wiki has gone but you can still find people's blog posts about how they got into this profession.)

A lot has happened to the industry and the profession in the last 10 years (there are many fewer libraries open, for a start), and there are people who'd be much better at documenting it than me. One thing I think we can all agree on is that the profession has become much more fragmented. There are many groups and sub-groups and splinter groups, and we don't speak with one voice very often. This is undoubtedly sad, but it's also completely inevitable.

People tend to regress towards the mean, by which I mean most of us see what's normal and that at least influences our thinking. The great thing about social media and the connected world is that there are so MANY means, so many normals - everyone can find their tribe. (This, of course, has its downsides in the wider context - idiots and hateful people can find other idiots to legitimise their hate. But that's not what this post is about.) So if you have a set of views, and you find others who share them, then you can DEVELOP those views rather have your rough edges smoothed off and your rebellion derailed... So I don't think we can really bemoan our fragmented profession - in a way it should always have been like this, but people couldn't find each other so easily before. Views and voices were more homogenised than they are now. It's true it would be easier to get things done if we all felt the same and agreed on everything - but given that isn't going to happen, we can all make progress on a local level, making our services the best they can be, and contributing to our communities in meaningful ways.

Over the last 10 years I've fallen in and out of love with various library organisations, I've said and done some things I'm proud of and some I cringe when I remember, and I've had amazing experiences I could never have predicted. The constant through all this has been the people - librarians are, for the most part, a magnificent community to be a part of. We are supportive. We share things. We talk openly about failures so others can learn from them, and we don't closely guard our successes so others can benefit from them too. We build meaningful networks online and in person and help each other get things done.

Of course there are exceptions to this happy picture, but that's the case in any large group of people. The trick is to work out who needs to blend into the background noise, and who might be on to something useful that can change the way you think...

If you read this blog, or are / have been part of my Twitter network, or if I've chatted to you at conferences or via email, thank you for helping shape my views and experiences over the last 10 years.

---

Image by National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), Applied Physics Laboratory - "PEPSSI Instrument Tastes Pluto's Atmosphere" from the Applied Physics Laboratory New Horizons website., Public Domain, commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=41340864

New Zealand, professional nourishment, parenthood and opportunities

Tweet

On Guy Fawkes Night I set off for New Zealand, where I pursued the most exciting opportunity of my professional life. It was AMAZING. But I also won't be doing it, or anything like it, again - for a very long time. Because it's a pretty selfish act, to go away for 8 days and leave your spouse and children to it, just because you get to do a cool thing. This post is partly unpacking that and partly writing about the fantastic experience of going to the LIANZA Conference.

Shed 6, where the conference took place, is on the left of this picture, near the crane. Amazing venue!

(Email subscribers! There's a lot of pictures in this one. If they're not displaying view the original post online.)

Taking opportunities

I am by nature both overly cautious, and overly lazy. As it happens falling into librarianship has sorted both those things out for the most part. It's not that I'm 'cured' of them, just that they're both constantly superseded by circumstances. I care about my job and the profession enough to stop me being lazy or cautious most of the time.

But it's always there, in me. Often I secretly hope things I'm committed to will fall through. When I went to the LIASA Conference in Cape Town the travel didn't get sorted for ages, and I started to get genuinely hopeful the whole thing would be called off. But it got sorted, and I had an absolutely incredible experience. It's always the way. 

So when the chance came up to go to LIANZA in Wellington (thanks to my bad fonts...) I was conflicted - I really, really wanted to go, because a) it was such an honour - to do a Keynote at an international conference, and I feel incredibly fortunate to get that sort of opportunity in the first place b) it was in Wellington, which sounded like an amazing place, and c) because I didn't want to give in to the lazy and cautious part of me and not pursue an extraordinary opportunity. In the negative column was a) I'd have to be away from my family for at least a week, which would be hard for me and also for them - solo parenting = zero fun a lot of the time, and b) I'd have to spend time at the weekends preceding the conference writing the keynote, and prepping the workshop I was also going to do while I was over there, and c) the journey door to door is about 35 hours each way, which is not much fun.

The positive column won over the negative column. Fundamentally I didn't want to turn down the greatest professional opportunity I'd ever been given. I asked my wife if I could do this, and she said yes - but really, it's not that meaningful to have done that, because she's not the kind of person who's going to say 'no, you must stay with us'. But she was dreading it. It loomed large in the calendar for us as a family - something to get to the other side of unscathed. I was excited, but it felt like a selfish excitement.

#SHOUT15 itself

I felt quite odd during the conference because I found it incredibly difficult with what was happening at home (more on which below) to be away, but it was perhaps the most professionally nourishing thing I'd ever done. I LOVED it.

The conference was fantastic. It was very much a shared experience for librarianship in New Zealand. I felt this about LIASA for South Africa too - and missed not having that in the UK. We don't have a single conference that unites everyone, that everyone in the profession catches up at. It's a shame, because it's a great feeling to be among a community who share so much understanding.

The powhiri begins...

We started with a powhiri - a Māori ritual ceremony of encounter. It's hard to describe - it involved all of us lining up inside the venue, and then entering as part of a sung call and response between our leader and those inside the building, which established we were friend rather than foe. Here we are all lined up, ready to go.

It was exciting! Everything about the opening to the event was vibrant - I genuinely feel for any New Zealanders coming to UK conferences because we can't promise anything quite as involving over here! 

The first keynote was from Sarah Houghton, who has achieved quite a high level of librarianship-celebrity with her Librarian in Black blog. She was talking about library ethics and privacy, and it was something I needed to hear. I believe in a notion of librarian ethics, but often on twitter it's assumed there's a universal set of values we all subscribe to. It's not really something that's ever come up, in my career, outside of the twitter and blogs discussions. I'm not sure staff are being told what our general values are, only those of the institutions they work in. (I may be wrong, but that's my experience of it.)

So to have Sarah lay out exactly what it means to be a librarian in terms of ethics and values, and to give several examples of not just what not to do but what we CAN do, was very valuable to me in shifting this whole conversation to a firmer footing in my head. Sarah's slides are here.

A picture Justin took to say hello to Jan Holmquist and Andromeda Yelton, our Buyalib partners

Justin and Ines Almeida

Then Justin Hoenke did his thing. I'll put a link to his keynote here when he uploads it, but you can watch the talk right away if you wish. I was unbelievably excited about meeting Justin, because we'd worked together before, but remotely, and it pleased both of us that we'd finally meet in so far-flung a location for someone from the US and someone from the UK... Amazingly it lived up to the hype, too - we spent a lot of time together and I absolutely loved it. I'm crap at being myself with people I've just met, but with Justin and with Ines from LIANZA I was able to do that right away, which is a rare and exciting thing for me that is so liberating it feels like flying.

Justin's talk was ace, and watching him deliver a talk in a very laid-back style made me, as someone who also tries to present as conversationally as possible, really excited about talking to this group of people. They were receptive and engaged and enthusiastic - perfect. I've never wanted to work in public libraries so much as when watching Justin talk: the difference he's made to his community both in his previous job and his current one is just amazing! It was inspiring.

Kim Tairi's slides were BEAUTIFUL and are online here - she uses her own drawings and I really like the style. Like all good slides they don't tell you the whole story, so you can watch her talk here. It was pretty amazing to hear Kim's talk because she seems like one of us, but she runs a library! She's in charge of a whole academic library! Justin and Kim are both (I think) somewhere around my age, and although I don't envy them being bosses I'm hugely admiring of their ability to do it. 

As I said in my talk, doing a keynote at an international conference felt like a big responsibility. I was as far away from my house as it's possible to get without coming back the other way, and although I didn't ask for a fee it still cost LIANZA a small fortune in plain tickets and hotels to get me there. I felt like my talk was positioned at the ideal time - Sarah and Justin had to open the thing, which is pressure; David Lankes had to close the thing, which is pressure; Kim had to speak first thing the night after the Gala Dinner, which is very tough indeed! My talk was 3 days in, and in the afternoon, and I felt really ready for it and happy with the slot. Usually I practice the first 10 minutes of a talk so I know how I'm going to start, and then allow things to flow from there - for this one I practiced the whole thing in full THREE times! I've watched it back and there's a few things I'd change, but it's basically a presentation that's as close to how I'd wanted it to go as it was possible to get. The people in the room were LOVELY: so supportive and responsive and engaged. It felt great. Thanks to everyone who tweeted such kind things, too.

If you're interested in the library marketing manifesto I presented, the slides and recording are elsewhere on the blog.

A picture of me presenting which I don't hate!

The audience being warmed up before my talk...

In the UK I normally cap workshops at 20 - this one had about 130! I think it sort of worked, although I should have trimmed it down a bit further

David Lankes started his talk by saying 'I'm glad I get to go last as I can correct Ned and Justin's keynotes...' which I liked. There were indeed things in David's (masterfully delivered) address which I disagree with, but I think people appreciated getting multiple perspectives. I certainly enjoyed the through-line of conversation between all the various talks - I quoted several of the other keynotes in mine and found them all to be valuable in shaping my thoughts. David has done a lot of big talks like this one, but it's still a new thing for me - he was very supportive, which I appreciated. We went to the amazing World War I exhibition at Te Papa and afterwards agreed that, in the grand scheme of things, the stuff we disagree about doesn't really matter...

---

Wellington is a fantastic place. I had no days there where the conference wasn't on, and there was always something in the programme I wanted to be at, so I only had the odd snatched moment to explore. I went up and down Cuba Street which was great, I ended up going to Te Papa, the national museum, twice because it was so amazing. On the first occasion I got there when it opened and headed straight for the top and worked my way down; everyone else did the opposite and it felt like I had the place to myself for about three quarters of an hour, which was magical.

The view from Te Pap's viewing platform. It is unbelievably windy up there!

Inside the amazing Te Papa

On the Tuesday after the Gala Dinner we retired to a Korean Karaoke Bar (I never do this sort of thing....) but I was running a workshop the next morning so I left at 1am, long before the rest. I have absolutely no sense of direction, so it was with some excitement that I set out into the Wellington night to find my way back to the hotel. Normally I use Google Maps for EVERYTHING but with no foreign data plan I just wondered around until I found the coast, and then followed it back home. It was great, having the quayside to myself with ocean crashing away in the dark beside me.

Justin sings a song by Journey...

Fireworks night on the waterfront

I met so many great people at SHOUT15 - I don't want to list everyone in case I miss someone out but you know who you are! It was brilliant meeting people I've known for years via Twitter, and I made a lot of new friends too. This is what made it such a fantastic event for me.

LIANZA made everything very easy, too. From the moment Ines and I started emailing about going over there they've been kind and helpful. It's a great organisation. One day I'll be back!

Fatherhood and Career Stuff

I've been away from my family for a period of a few nights four times since my 5-year-old was born, all career related: the SLA Conference in America, LIASA in South Africa, doing some training in Australia, and now LIANZA. For the latter 3 of these, I was away for about 8 nights - essentially the shortest possible time without it being impossible to get anything meaningful done whilst there. The journey in each case was at least a day each way, so the time spent in each country was basically 5 days. Parenthood is more important to me than my career, so how can I justify this? In each case, it felt like a one-off opportunity, too good to miss. I wouldn't trade going to any of them - they've each felt hugely significant in my development, and my understanding of culture. But as of now, there won't be any more until at least the kids are a lot older, or they can come too. 

While I was away this time, they had a spectacularly unlucky time. Both of them ended up in hospital (the youngest in the middle of the night, the oldest rushed there from school in an ambulance), and my wife ended up missing work attending to and following up all of that drama. Other smaller things went wrong too and all in all it was just massively stressful - and I wasn't there. Because of what happened with our youngest last year (and her last treatment was only a couple of months ago so it's been a real war of attrition) there's a sort of residual stress-level to do with their health, which means relatively small problems feel like yet another thing to deal with. Everything feels bigger than it is. It was awful to be literally as far away from home as it's possible for someone in England to be - the guilt of voluntarily not being there came second to the horrible feeling of just not being able to help. I had anxiety dreams and trouble sleeping. I coped by not thinking about it as much as possible during the day, which felt like a betrayal in itself.

(I'm aware how #firstworldproblems this all sounds - but I didn't want to present a varnished version of this experience that made it all sound like perfection. It's important that we talk about this stuff and the feelings that surround it. Everyone has different circumstances around work/life balance, and I'm glad this post has sparked conversations around that in general rather than specifically doing talks abroad. The specifics are different for all of us but there are common issues. Lots of people have told me men don't talk about this stuff enough, too!)

So basically, no matter how cool the thing abroad, I can't do it anymore. For a while. Everyone else has to suffer while I swan off to another country and have fun. It's just not justifiable. The fact is I don't need to do it, I don't have to travel abroad for my job. I want to do it - if it were consequence free for my family that would be fine, but it isn't, so it's not.

Shout15 was an awesome, fantastic, magical way to duck out of long-haul foreign travel.

I can't believe you've read this far...

Thanks for getting to this bit, if you did. My overall feeling from LIANZA is that people are pretty great. We all need to look after each other.